Tal El Hawkins

Recently I am thinking of making a warrior for killing PvE mobs only. As I have other characters, I do not need my warrior to do Dungeons or WvW.

Rather, I would like to create a Warrior that I could causally "OWNZ" most if not all of the normal mobs including veterans and perhaps join others in killing dragons occasionally (not important).

I hope the community can help me with a Warrior build that could easily do this. The build should

(1) Kill normal mobs quickly and yet almost mindlessly
(2) Kill veteran mobs quickly (if it takes some skill here, it is fine)

It will great if you can also recommend the gears (weapon sets, armor type, runes and jewellery) for this.
Again, tagging mobs for loots or karma is of little important.

Today I have finally saved enough to buy myself the corrupted short bow. I already have the long bow version.

To my utter disappointment, I discovered that the short bow skin is exactly the same as the long bow version!

I consider corrupted short bow to be one of the "high-end" bow designed for its visual look (stats are the same as the crafted valkyrie short bow). The corrupted lodestones are selling for around 1.6G now and I have saved some time for them.  I feel Anet should not do such a  "cheap" way of getting around designing a long/short bow skin. So much for the visual carrot

Well lesson learnt ... dun trust Anet when in come to bow skins. Always check the internet :/

Sorry to ask a noob question, but does adding power, toughness and vitality also add to minions' power/toughness/vitality?

I would like to hear the community opinions about the ease of leveling to 80 from the easiest to the hardest. In addition, do provide reasons in to your ranking.

For a start, I have 6 level 80 professions and hence have some experiences in leveling them (except for warrior and elementalist, leveled without doing crafting).

Ranger - When using double bears, I believe ranger is the easiest to level
Warrior - Their high armor and dps allow them to level the next fastest. Very tolerant to mistakes
Guardian - They are so difficult to die. Just dun get too ambitious to challenge Champions at lowbies
Necromancer - After getting the flesh golem at level 30, you basically faceroll most mobs
Engineer - Will be tough at low level but once you some kits, things began to look bright. AOE king with bombs kit at earlier levels
Thief - Squishy armour coupled with low health means a tight control over your initiative. Good at 1v1 or even 1v2. Problem arises when facing more mobs
Mesmer - Hell when leveling from 1-40 and almost made you want to give up. After level 40, you starts to see sunshine.
Elementalist - You need tons of coffee for this profession. Almost any mistake will cost you your life. Need eagle eye ability to play well

Do share your thoughts!

As my thief approaches level 80, I began to meddle her build to test out some cookie cutters post in this forum.

Currently I am comparing between various death blossom build as the bleeding stacks seems to be a lot of fun.

So far, most of the death blossom builds revolved around Deadly Arts, Acrobat and Trickery, with the main purpose of increasing survivability.

However, when I read Minion's Invincible build (also post in this forum), I begin to consider the viability of a hybrid Power + Condition build. The primary essense to this hybrid build is that in the dual dagger skills, there are two very outstanding skills: Death Blossom and Heartseeker!

It is easy to see that Death Blossom benefits from condition duration (nearest tick) and condition damage. On the other hand, Heartseeker will benefits from Precision and Power.

Suppose we use the Rampager Armour/Jewellery/Weapon and traits something like 10/30/0/0/30 as suggested in the Minion's Invincible thief build.

During encounters with mobs, we start off with Shadow Refuge as a gap closer and spam a few death blossom(around 5 spams with steal) to soften the mobs. Next, we use RoI to get back some initiative and proceeds to use Heartseeker to clean the left over. Catrops or Uncatchable trait can help us to control mobs movement.

Damage wise, this hybrid build utilizes both condition + power + crit chance. For defense, since Death blossom animation gives temporary invulnerability, the first part of the execution should be relatively safe even for a glass cannon build. The 2nd part involving Heartseeker can be executed with CnD for stealth if necessary. Dual Pistols - Unload, which also utilizes Power and Crit chance, can be also swapped to attack from a safer distance. Again, catrops are used to control movement and add more bleeding.

Such a build removes the need to rely totally on bleeding, and it also helps in destroying stationary objects.

As I am currently unable to test this concept in game, I am wondering what the community think about this hybrid and if it is better, equal or inferior to a more common death blossom build.